TRANSCRIPT:
​ I am sure it comes as no surprise to those who usually listen to this podcast that I am a feminist. It is a no-brainer to me to stand for equality for all, regardless of gender, race, or sexual orientation. It also seems obvious to me that if you are a woman and you are an artist, you are probably a feminist. What better way to stand against discrimination in the art world than to embrace intersectional feminism? While there are many who do not agree with me, feminist artists are strong in number and even stronger in their effect on the art world. Today, I will talk about the lasting impact that feminism has had on art.
Feminists are regular historiographers. A historiographer studies how history has been written about and recorded, and what inherent biases are present in these records. Feminists have scoured historical records that are rampant with misogyny to dig up many of history’s “forgotten” women, including female artists that historians seem to have skipped over. Queer and feminist scholars have had to deal with the “historical invisibility” of their subjects, as their subjects are “not the stuff of official histories” (Latimer 93). The reason I have access to all of the information about women artists I have used in previous episodes is in large part due to the feminist art historians who made the invisible visible again. A great example of this is a book written by the anonymous feminist art activist group, the Guerrilla Girls. Their book is called The Guerrilla Girls’ Bedside Companion to the History of Western Art, and it focuses on women artists throughout history that have been kept out of standard art history curriculums. The book also emphasizes the point that women means all women, as the history of Western Art has often excluded people of color (Guerrilla Girls 8). From ancient Greece and Rome to the 19th century, the Bedside Companion shows its readers the amazing women they have been missing out on.
In the beginning of the women’s movement, artists like Rosa Bonheur and Mary Cassatt joined the effort while other artists “disavowed feminism after making it in a man’s world” (Guerrilla Girls 49). Those who followed Bonheur’s and Cassatt’s footsteps in the 19th and 20th centuries made feminist art history. One of the most famous pieces of feminist art is Judy Chicago’s The Dinner Party, created from 1974-79. The Dinner Party is a giant “ceremonial banquet,” with places set at a large table for many famous women in history. There are 39 place settings, and 999 names written on the floor (“The Dinner Party”). In my opinion, this piece is a visual representation of the feminist historiography I mentioned before. All 1,038 names in the work are names that were, unfortunately but most likely, left out of common history and art history curriculums. The Guerrilla Girls not only pushed for the inclusion of more women in galleries and museums, but also made their own propaganda-inspired art. In 1989, the Guerrilla Girls created a billboard showing a lounging nude woman with a gorilla mask over her head. The text on the billboard said:

​ Do women have to be naked to get into the Met. Museum?
Less than 5% of the artists in the Modern Art sections are women, but 85% of the nudes are female (“Posters, Stickers, Billboards, Actions: 1985-2016”).

This provocative piece was only the start of what the Guerrilla girls set out to do. The anonymous group continues to make work today, and they have criticized everything from the lack of women’s artwork in museums, to the abysmal wages paid to those who work in art galleries, to lack of representation of the art of people of color, to limits on gay rights, and so on (“Posters, Stickers, Billboards, Actions: 1985-2016”). Artists like the Guerrilla Girls and Judy Chicago helped open the doors to feminist art, and today there is an even wider range of feminist artistic expression.
Especially because of the spread of information in the age of the Internet, feminist art is more popular than ever. One of my favorite contemporary feminist artists is Kara Walker. Her characteristic, beautiful cut-paper silhouettes depict the lives and history of African-American women. In her artist statement, she says that she is “rewriting History” even though there is “a lot of (white, patriarchal) damage to undo” (“Kara Walker”). Another contemporary feminist artist I admire is Shirin Neshat. She is a photographer and digital artist who focuses on exploring the roles of women in Islamic, specifically Iranian, society. She creates a “feminist reclamation of history that tells Iran’s story via the female gaze” (“The Feminism of Resilience”). Artists like Walker and Neshat are part of a vast network of feminist artists working today, and I encourage you to check out their work and the work of other contemporary women artists.
Today’s feminism is not your mother’s feminism, and today’s feminist artwork and art activism is not the second-wave stereotype that people like to pretend it is. Today, intersectional feminist artists promote the work of women, people of color, and the LGBTQI+ community. Our goal is to remove the “historical invisibility” of the artists in all of these groups, and encourage future generations to create art even when they aren’t represented in the mainstream art world. It is time to break the tradition of the white, male art world. In the words of Rosa Bonheur, “let women establish their claims by great and good works and not by conventions” (Guerrilla Girls 49).

​ I have not yet explained why I chose to call this podcast Aesthetic Greatness. In all honesty, it is a pretty snarky title. I chose Aesthetic Greatness because of this quote by renowned art critic Brian Sewell:

There has never been a first-rank woman artist. Only men are capable of aesthetic greatness. Women make up 50% or more of classes at art school. Yet they fade away in their late 20s or 30s. Maybe it’s something to do with bearing children (Gunter).

I wanted to turn this idea on its head. Not only am I, as a woman, capable of aesthetic greatness in my art, but also I am capable of creating Aesthetic Greatness the podcast full of episodes that prove this quote wrong. As it turns out, this is not the only quote, man, or even woman that I need to disprove. There are very, very many. This episode is dedicated to those who became true examples of sexist art critics.
There are, even today, few exceptions to the rule that art critics think lesser of women artists and their work. In the 19th and 20th centuries, the sexism in art criticism was even more blatant. Stereotypes about women permeated past a woman’s social life and into the reception of her work. Multiple male critics claimed during this era that women were simply not creative or original (Nemser 74). C.J. Bulliet, an art critic from the 1920s, went so far as to say this about artist Mary Cassatt: “like the vast majority of women artists…Miss Cassatt preferred to be a lesser man” (Mitchell 681). People also thought that women were not serious enough about art (Nemser 77). Critics stripped women’s art of all intellectualism, as seen in Paul Rosenfeld’s comment about Georgia O’Keefe’s work having “no traces of intellectualization” (Mitchell 682). It is evident that ideas about a woman’s place in society affected the criticism of women’s work. If a woman stepped outside of the home to pursue something that was stereotypically male, like art was, then she was obviously trying to be like a man. If she was trying to be a man, she could clearly only ever be mediocre, because she was, in fact, a woman. Unfortunately, when critics would attempt to speak positively about female artists, the fact that she was a woman only made reviews painfully typecast.
Knowing that an artist was a woman would often cause 19th and 20th century critics to attribute many of the elements of a piece to an inherent femininity. Characteristics such as passivity, emotionality, and sensitivity were attributed to women’s work whether they were accurate descriptors or not (Nemser 76). A great example of this is the undying trend of associating all of Georgia O’Keefe’s paintings of flowers with female genitalia. For decades, art critics saw O’Keefe’s flowers and immediately associated them with her womanhood. O’Keefe “repeatedly rejected [this] Freudian interpretation” of her flowers. She actually associated her flowers more with skyscrapers than with vaginas. She made the flowers “big like the huge buildings going up” so people would notice them and she would become more well known (Mitchell 684). Flowers were not the only subjects considered to be feminine. “Sunday picnics, playing children, and women preparing to look their best” was how critic John Baur boiled down Berthe Morisot’s subject matter, which was, according to him, obviously drawn from her own femininity (Nemser 76). To me, this assertion is just silly. Sunday picnics and women at their vanities were common subjects for men as well – take for example the work of Morisot’s contemporaries, such as Edouard Manet’s 1863 painting Le Dejeuner sur l’Herbe or Degas’s 1905 painting Woman at Her Toilette (“Edoard Manet Luncheon on the Grass,” “Woman at Her Toilette”). Yet, when painted by a woman, these subjects were chosen because of her femininity, not because they were good and popular subjects.
Now my question is this: How do we change these old perceptions of female artists that linger still today? The answer is not a simple one, but it starts with the very first episode of Aesthetic Greatness. It starts with art education. To change the way we talk about women’s art, we need to educate people with the vocabulary to do so. If we teach art history equally, regardless of the gender of the artist, our art criticism will become more equal. It is also extremely important to educate people about why they see so few examples of historically successful female artists. The more society understands the difficulties that female artists had to face, the less likely they are to confuse women’s inequality in the art world with the false notion of women’s inferior talent for art. We do not need any more people like Georg Baselitz, an artist who blatantly said that “women don’t paint very well” and tried to justify his claim by saying “the market doesn’t lie” (Miller).
In summary, art critics in history had problems with women artists, and some of the ideas they had about the mediocrity of women artists are still present today. To rid the art world of this prejudice, we have to start with an art education curriculum that presents not only the art of all genders in equal light, but also discusses the difficulties artists who were not white men faced. We cannot just explain why critics like Brian Sewell and artists like Georg Baselitz are wrong about women artists. We have to make sure that sexist individuals like them do not exist in the art world in the first place. To end this episode, I will leave you with a quote from Cindy Nemser’s 1973 work, “Art Criticism and Women Artists:”

My intention is to uncover these stereotypes and to bring them into the open. Perhaps when exposed to the clear light of reason, they will be laughed out of existence. Then we can begin anew to judge women’s art (73).

Georgia O'Keefe, who painted the record holder for price paid at auction for an artwork by a female artist. (commons.wikimedia.org)

TRANSCRIPT:

​ I am shy to admit that, in my more recent past, I have often referred to graphic design as “making art for the Man.” Graphic design was “selling out” – it was losing your creative freedom, your voice, your bohemian artist lifestyle. But as I come into my junior year of college, it is dawning on me that it is usually necessary to create art for “the Man” if you want your art to be your main source of income, whether you are a graphic designer or not. When I started thinking about art and money, I started noticing the invisible web that navigates through ideas of art and class. This web also weaves its way through gender, which led me to the title of this episode: Women, Art, and Social Class. Social class has more of an impact on art than many are comfortable acknowledging. Art critic Ben Davis explored this connection in his essay 9.5 Theses on Art and Class. Davis begins by pointing out what seems obvious to him: “Class is an issue of fundamental importance to art” (27). He even acknowledges the public’s discomfort when it comes to relating the two. The label of “the art world,” he asserts, is just a way of trying to separate art from issues like social class (27). If art is in its own world – that is, if it exists in a bubble, as many people would like to think – then outside social factors cannot affect it. Unfortunately, this has never been the case. Davis also states that the upper classes of our capitalist society, because they “control” the hegemonic values of our culture, also determine what is of value in art (28). This is also unfortunate, but when you look back into art history, it is difficult to be surprised. From the Renaissance on, the rich patrons that could afford to hire artists have determined the monetary value of art. Although in the modern era it seems to be subtler than it was when wealthy European nobles and religious figures ordered around artists such as Rubens and Van Eyck, the influence exerted by the upper classes today is comparable.
Interestingly, though art often caters primarily to the ruling class, most people working in art are middle class (Davis 28). The working class, on the other hand, has “weak relations” to the world of visual art (Davis 29). This is somewhat ironic, because the middle class world of art, which is dominated by the middle class idea of art as self expression but actually governed by ruing class values, is often centered around the working class manual labor required to produce art (Davis 30). Because art is closely tied to class, and class is related to gender, we must explore how class relates to gender in order to see the relationship among all three.
Women’s economic status differs from that of men. In every single ethnic and racial group, women are poorer than men (Cawthorne). The push toward “pink-collar” jobs relegates women to specific jobs, such as teaching and childcare, and these women-dominated fields pay less (Cawthorne). Women also do more unpaid caregiving, as they are often responsible for caring for children and the elderly (Cawthorne). Honestly, if you live in the USA and you don’t live under a rock, you probably know these things. It is unfortunate but true that last year in 2015 women made 79 cents for every dollar a man made, according to the Institute for Women’s Policy research (“Pay Equity & Discrimination”). In short, our society has class issues, our class issues have gender issues, and both of these issues heavily affect art.
This is a very complicated subject that this brief podcast will not be able to cover completely. It has aspects that are even deeper and more intricate than what I have explained here and tried to make as concise as possible. But this episode has connections to all past episodes and all future episodes. Exploring class explains so much about women in art, and in the short time we have in this podcast, I will discuss only a few of these connections. First, it is difficult to make time for art when society expects you to be the caretaker of your family. In 2013, women spent six hours more on housework per week than men, and three hours more caring for children (Jayson). Women do not get paid for this work, and when a woman has less money, time spent on artwork and in the art world is limited. Women’s artwork is also viewed as less valuable monetarily. Georgia O’Keefe’s painting Jimson Weed/White Flower No. 1 was sold at auction for over $35 million, making it the record holder for price paid at auction for an artwork by a female artist. $35 million, however, is not even close to $179.4 million, the auction price of Picasso’s Les Femmes d’Alger (“Get the Facts”). It is discouraging for women who want to be artists that not only are they not represented as extensively as men, but also not valued as highly. When a woman does break into the art world, she realizes what everyone else does: regardless of gender – the value of art is determined by the ruling class, and making art for “the Man” is often a necessary evil.
Thus, as long as there is class disparity in art, it will remain especially difficult for women to excel in art. Social class determines what kind of art is valued and whose art is valued, and women’s art is almost always accorded less esteem and value than men’s. In other words, it’s always hard to be a woman when you are working for “the Man.”

Works Cited

Cawthorne, Alexandra. "The Straight Facts on Women in Poverty." Center for American Progress. Center for American Progress, 8 Oct. 2008. Web. 14 July 2016. <https://www.americanprogress.org/issues/women/report/2008/10/08/5103/the-straight-facts-on-women-in-poverty/>.

Davis, Ben. 9.5 Theses on Art and Class. , 2013. Internet resource.

"Get the Facts." National Museum of Women in the Arts. National Museum of Women in the Arts, 2014. Web. 14 July 2016. <http://www.nmwa.org/advocate/get-facts>.

This summer, I studied abroad in Venice, Italy. Among the vast swaths of tourists from different states, countries, and continents, there was usually one commonality: selfie sticks. For those of you who don’t know, selfie sticks are extendable metal rods that hold your smartphone so you can get the best picture of yourself possible when your arms just aren’t long enough to get the whole scene into one shot. Venice is filled with selfie sticks. Peddlers stand on almost every corner, hawking selfie sticks to passersby, preying on their vanity so they can make some sort of living wage. My fellow students and I were very, very annoyed by these selfie sticks. They poked out at random in crowds, threatening to poke your eye out if you got too close. They were the cause of much of the tourist traffic, since people seemed to think that the middle of a thin bridge over a canal was the best place to come to a complete stop, whip out a selfie stick, and take a photo. While these selfie-sticks were annoying, they got me thinking. Selfies, especially selfies of women, have caused a lot of controversy in the last few years. What relation do modern selfies have to the more “classic” self-portraits I passed in the Venice museums? In a way I think that art, especially photography, has been democratized. Everyone with a cell phone has access to a camera. Anyone can snap a self-portrait with the tap of a touch-screen button. Because of this, I want to use this episode to delve into the history of women’s self-portraits and how it relates to women’s modern selfies.
If it was historically subversive for a woman to become an artist, a woman artist painting a self-portrait was doubly so. From the Renaissance on, women usually had one static role in art – object. Women were models, women were representations of ideas, and women were there to be pretty. Women also usually had one narrow role in society – the traditionally feminine, quiet, meek woman. This meant that when a woman artist created a self-portrait, it turned into an “ongoing struggle to reconcile cultural constrictions of femininity with what it meant to be an artist and a woman at specific historical moments” as art historian Whitney Chadwick has noted (10). For example, take a look at Sofonisba Anguissola’s 1556 painting, Self-Portrait Painting the Virgin and Child. Here, Anguissola seems to be occupied with painting, but is looking at the viewer instead of her work. She is finely dressed in clothes she probably would not have worn for the messy task of painting, her hair is plaited in a tidy up-do, and her skin has a youthful glow. She looks, by all accounts, traditionally feminine. She is the object of the work. Yet, she asserts that she belongs in the male-dominated art world by painting a religious image on the easel in front of her. Because it did not involve learning anatomy, portraiture was seen as acceptable for women in Anguissola’s time. ​Religious paintings enjoyed higher status than portraits, and Anguissola makes a public statement about her skill by including this image in her self-portrait (Borzello 46). She and later women artists, such as Judith Leyster and Elisabeth Vigee-Lebrun, boldly broke into the male territory of art and self-portraits and “renegotiated the relationship between subject and object” through their struggle to depict themselves as both feminine and powerful artists (Chadwick 21).
As women’s presence in the art world grew, their self-portraits expanded from a battle between artist-hood and femininity to a more explorative, experimental space. My favorite example of this experimentation is Frida Kahlo who, in the 1920s, “began to turn her whole life into a visual diary” (Borzello, “Behind the Image” 28). Kahlo’s self-portraits are bizarre in a good way. She rejects the pressure to express respectable femininity, instead painting her emotions and her life. In 1946, Kahlo painted The Wounded Deer, one of my favorite paintings. This self-portrait rejects traditional notions of femininity and artistry, and is centered instead around a visual representation of Kahlo’s own wounded emotions. In fact, her depiction of herself as the deer is overtly un-feminine – the deer is a buck. In a subversion of both gender and traditional self-portraiture, Kahlo shows us the inner workings of a female mind instead of the more conventional and superficial search for female validation.
There is no better place to start talking about modern female validation than with the selfie. Unlike many self-portraits, selfies have garnered a bad reputation, especially for young girls. They are judged, as Jessica Bennett has observed, as “narcissistic, humble-braggy, slutty, too sexy, a `cry for help,` or yet another way for girls’ to judge each other (or seek validation for their looks)” (Bennett). But selfies have much more positive power than this. Just as Kahlo expanded ideas of what was possible for women’s self-portraits, so women’s selfies today are pushing back against mainstream media’s idea of beauty and femininity. In a manner similar to earlier women artists whose self-fashioning in self-portraiture gave them control of how they were seen, selfies allow modern women to project the version of themselves that they choose, regardless of societal norms. Selfies also let women celebrate their flaws, emphasize actions over appearance, and even make a feminist statement (Bennett).
In conclusion, I see selfies as the inevitable evolution of the female self-portrait. Women’s selfies are judged today just as women’s self-portraits were judged in the Renaissance: Is she feminine enough? Is she talented enough? Is she beautiful enough? By taking the representation of themselves into their own hands, women in history and women today seize control and transform their objectivity into subjectivity. The self-portrait and the selfie are both ways of forcing the world around you to see you as you see yourself – as a beautiful, talented, woman of action. To end this episode, I will quote art historian Whitney Chadwick’s essay, How Do I Look?:

I like to think that in taking up brush or pen, chisel or camera, women assert a claim to the representation of women (as opposed to Woman) that Western culture long ago ceded to male genius and patriarchal perspectives, and that in turning to the image in the mirror they take another step towards the elaboration of a sexualized subjective female identity (Chadwick, 9).

"Self-portrait Hesitating between the Arts of Music and Painting", Angelica Kauffman, 1791 (commons.wikimedia.org)

TRANSCRIPT:
In 1793 Angelica [Kauffman] returned to Rome where she continued to paint until her death in 1807. Her funeral was held in Rome, and was recorded at the time as the largest to ever pass through the streets. The entire membership of the Royal Academy of England was in attendance and the first four directors of the Academy walked at the four corners of her pall, while two academicians held up two of her paintings which caught and reflected the glimmering candlelight from the hundreds of lighted tapers carried by the aristocracy and the famous of England and Europe. The eulogy for Kauffman echoed through the church: “Hail! Most Excellent Woman and in Peace, Farewell, Mother of all the Arts.”

Her bust was later placed in the Pantheon of Rome. Historians have chosen to remember Angelica Kauffman as a “minor decorative painter.” Her decorative work was indeed “minor,” but only in relationship to her other fine portraits and paintings, and because decorative painting is a field where women have always been allowed to excel. Angelica Kauffman was, indeed, deserving of a greater tribute. Her contemporaries honored her and respected her; it is his-story that has relegated her and her achievement (Snyder-Ott, 79-80).

When I read this passage for the first time during my first year as an art student, I almost cried. How had this information been kept from me for so long? How could Kauffman’s story have affected me had I heard it years ago? For so many years, my knowledge of art and art history has been almost completely male-centered. Now, in an era when women are learning more and more about their roles in the traditionally male version of history, it is time to talk about women and art education.
While researching for this episode, I gravitated mostly toward the book “Women, Art, and Education” by Georgia Collins and Renee Sandell. When I picked up this book at the library, it was a little more beat up than I expected. Its bright pink cover was cracked and bent, some water damage seemed evident, and I think I even spotted some coffee stains. When I checked the publication date, I thought this all made sense – “Women, Art, and Education” was published in 1984. All of a sudden I had a moment of panic. There were so few books on women and art education, and I had trouble even finding this one. Was it simply too old for me to reference?
As I flipped through the crisp, old pages of the book, I realized that though it was from 1984, its content was all too applicable to now. From the lack of female artists noted in art history survey texts (Collins and Sandell 24), to the masculine values typical of historical art critiques (Collins and Sandell 25), it was obvious to me that little has changed since Collins and Sandell published this book. In fact, according to the National Gallery of Women in the Arts, “only 27 women are represented in the current edition of H.W. Janson’s survey, History of Art - up from zero in the 1980s” (“Get the Facts”).
In my mind, this amount of change simply is not enough. Art is still seen as a more “feminine” subject, and marginalized as a result (Collins and Sandell 32). In 2015, the amount of federal funding allotted to education in the arts was 25 million dollars – even lower than it was over 10 years ago in 2002 when it was 30 million (“Funding the Arts”). Less art education, and less education about female artists in particular, also means fewer same-sex role models for women in art (Collins and Sandell 35). Even if women do succeed in completing the intensive years it takes to earn a degree like a Masters of Fine Arts, only a quarter of New York galleries have solo shows featuring women – even though half of graduating MFA’s are women (“Get the Facts”).
In the end, my greatest question concerning women and art education is this: what happens when you fill the gaps? What happens when students are given equal access to information about and works by both male and female artists? A study published in 2003 asked similar questions. In this study, Themina Kader and Erin Tapley, both assistant professors of art education at the University of Wisconsin Oshkosh, used Surrealist works by males and females in a classroom setting to find out how gender influences student perceptions of art (Kader and Tapley 62). After a slide show presentation and a short discussion, students were encouraged to create their own surrealist works (Kader and Tapley 68). By examining the artwork created by the students in grade levels four through twelve, Kader and Tapley concluded that “students could be just as influenced by the contribution of both genders to the Surrealist movement” (Kader and Tapley 70).
Through this study, it is easy to see that students of art and art history can equally feel the influence of female artists and male artists equally. Now all we have to do is to ensure that students havethe access students have to art by all artists equally, regardless of gender identification.

"FUNDING THE ARTS IN EDUCATION PROGRAM AT THE U.S. DEPARTMENT OF EDUCATION." (n.d.): n. pag. Americans for the Arts. 2015. Web. 29 Feb. 2016.<http://www.americansforthearts.org/sites/default/files/pdf/2015/events/arts-advocacy-day/handbook/3.AIE-final.pdf>.

"Get the Facts." National Museum of Women in the Arts. National Museum of Women in the Arts, 2014. Web. 29 June 2016. <http://www.nmwa.org/advocate/get-facts>.